Economic development, current events, travel, sustainable living, and fatherhood, all from an agrarian perspective

Thursday, June 6, 2013

To Cultivate Peace

This is an
old report called “Cultivating Peace”, about the relationship between agricultureand violent conflict (if you have trouble downloading the pdf itself, try here).It is wide-ranging
in its scope of topics, talking about different theories of war, agriculture,
and economic prosperity (all with a focus on the post Cold War context).The last part of the report is an impressive
and sad survey of how agriculture has been specifically targeted for
destruction in different (mainly Western) wars throughout history.Especially horrid was the Biafran example of
6000 daily starvation deaths for part of1968.

Incidental
to the report’s argument but fascinating for me, someone who is interesting in
agrarian social structures, the report has a good discussion of vertical
patron-client relationships, which is to say when a poor or landless peasant
feels more loyalty to the local wealthy farmer that employs him and somewhat
provides for his needs, than to the other poor peasants around him.There is also an accurate description and
diagnosis of how an urban policy bias exists in many countries, whereby
governments protect industries with policies while simultaneously undermining
agricultural producers, thus keeping happy urban elites and food-purchasing
workers, while driving peasants out of business and towards the cities as
destitute migrants.

The report
is somewhat inconclusive about the effects of agriculture on war, but its general
gist is that a productive agriculture, backed by a functioning democracy, tends
to defuse the possibility of widespread war.This is because in the midst of plenty and in the midst of real
representation, people feel their government is legitimate, and this legitimacy
in turn allows the government to channel people’s frustration and respond to
smaller conflicts before they spin out of control.The ending conclusions of the report focus on
the agricultural productivity angle, despite most of the report’s focusing on
governance and not food productivity.This
makes sense; the study was commissioned by the CGIAR agricultural research centers,
so the authors must have felt obliged to play up the importance of agricultural
productivity in assuring peace.The
conclusion thus comes off as a bit clumsy, but the rest of the report is a
really good analysis.